Review: The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious

The Wizard Who Kept Himself Suspicious by Scott Lynch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy Scott Lynch, so when I saw this on Bookbub I hardly hesitated before picking it up. It's in his usual slightly tongue-in-cheek high style, the kind of style that earnest fans of Jack Vance often attempt and fail at miserably, but that Lynch has the chops to pull off and make just slightly self-parodying while still working in its own terms.

It's a short work, just a few brief chapters, but complete in itself. The wizard of the title is a member of a wizards' conclave that meets every 13 years on a beach drawn up out of the remote ocean for the purpose. He keeps himself suspicious by never demonstrating any magic at these meetings, so that some of his colleagues are convinced he's not actually a wizard. The test applied by one of them on this particular occasion to try to trick him into settling this one way or the other is repurposed as an ingenious murder weapon, and the (possibly not actually a) wizard cleverly solves the crime.

There are perhaps a few too many of the wizards to easily keep straight in this short a book, but they are spectacularly powerful and eccentric in their presentations, and their magic can do basically anything they can imagine. Since their imaginations are Scott Lynch's, they do some wild and entertaining things. But even though their magic is effectively unlimited, the way in which the murder is performed is still subject to analysis.

The group dynamics, the individual personalities, the wizards' bizarre conveyances and appearances, and their different reactions to the events are well developed, and the mystery itself I found satisfying, both the problem and the solution.

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